Like everyone I wear many hats, mum, daughter, friend, co-worker but this blog is almost exclusively about what I get up to with my quilter hat on and my creative adventures in this wonderful and absorbing craft. In one guise or another I’ve sewn all my life but the quilting bug has taken over.

I live in the UK with my three college/school age children but very sadly we lost Dad a few years ago. It’s been tough at times. We have two lovely cats who will make an appearance on this blog whilst the children would be truly horrified  to have their faces shown. I’ve taught them too well about keeping their pictures off social media!   The cats of course rule supreme. Both aim to be quilt helpers and fail miserably as their main intent is to stop me so I can give them some attention. In this respect they usually succeed unless of course it’s not going well in which case they steer a clear path as do the children. And of course this website is named after one of the cats, a lilac Tonkinese, simply because she came to live with us around the same time as I started quilting and they seem to go together so well. It also helped that, perhaps unsurprisingly, no one else who was quilting was called ‘the lilac cat’!!

For me quilting is that creative escape that means there is one thing in my life that I can complete and it’s finished as opposed to so many things like cooking and gardening which just need redoing all the time. I love modern quilting, odd really as our house is quite trad with more types of beige on the walls than you can possibly imagine! But I love the freedom of improv, beautiful fresh fabric designs  and many other types of quilting. Even handstitching I’ve found to be a relaxing way to craft but it took me a while to accept the concept of slow stitching. Oh and did I mention that I have more fabric than I really ought to!! I know I’m not alone in that respect….